Scribner's Magazine/Volume 70/Number 1/The Tragedy on the Upper Snake River

by Arthur Sherburne Hardy

 

THE TRAGEDY ON THE UPPER SNAKE RIVER

By Arthur Sherburne Hardy

Illustrations by Oliver Kemp

I

WHEN Isaac of Caranac married, the woods laughed. Even the old otter who had lost a claw in one of his [traps] smiled sardonically at the sight of Maggie's skirt on the Upper Snake River. Caranac heard the news with undisguised satisfaction; for the taciturn, self-contained man had been brought low and reduced to the level of ordinary humanity.

Curiosity to see the woman who had proved Isaac to be no exception was rampant. Others had set snares for him, piqued by his aloofness, and failed. But curiosity had been balked. Isaac had come in from camp at dusk, paid a brief visit to the justice of the peace, and departed as he came, silently, with a maid changed to wife and a fresh supply of bacon and tobacco.

Rumour, however, was as plentiful in Caranac as blackbirds in its neglected orchards. Of these rumors the most absorbing concerned a maid to the lady of the camp on Faraway Lake—one Mary, a foolish little moth whose wings had been singed in Isaac's candle. She was a timid thing, affrighted by the hoot of an owl. She wore a gown to which every brier and thorn clung lovingly. She was the only occupant of Isaac's canoe who had ever succeeded in upsetting it, insisting later that he had saved her from death in a fathomless depth which Isaac sarcastically described as "scurce two foot o' water"; and in the fervor of her gratitude had played upon his fondness for literature by reading to him during gun-cleaning—the last straw on the back of Maggie's jealousy.

What took place that evening when Maggie, ablaze with indignation, strode into the firelight, is a matter of record. One of the guides, awakened by Mary's sobbing, attested to the amazing fact that Maggie slept that night in Isaac's lean-to, covered by Isaac's blanket, and that Isaac had sat staring into the fire till the dogs yawned and shook the pine-needles from their flanks at daybreak.

Maggie's invasion, however, had begun before this final incident. Its negative character masked its insidiousness. She minded her own business. Isaac had infinite patience, born of many fruitless visits to traps and anxious dealings with wary trout in deep pools. But he disliked all interference. Maggie let him alone. She asked no foolish questions, as Mary did. Her very aloofness attracted.

Isaac knew the habits of every animal in the Caranac woods. Like Maggie they avoided him, and in his cautious way he began to study Maggie, to pursue her in thought, unconsciously, from force of habit, as he did his four-footed enemies. He observed that her camp kitchen bore no resemblance to the slovenly back doors in Caranac, and while Isaac wore no ruffles he loved clear-running water and re-made his balsam bed religiously once a week. Nor did ever any one in Caranac sing as Maggie did while scouring pots—not "perky like," as did Alexina at the church sociables, but "just nat'iral and unconsarned," as the thrush sings at nightfall, heedless of audience. He likened it to the brook that sang to nobody, hurrying to the lazy reaches of the Upper Snake River. Lord and master of the trails as he was, of the art of artlessness he had no knowledge. Insensibly Maggie took possession of him as a natural right. She made it plain, when sewing the patch on his corduroys, that she thought lightly of his needlework. But in humbling him she did not rub it in. There was nothing triumphant in Maggie's superiority.

Everywhere in the wild was one law, that the hunter should be hunted. But in that long night of watching, while Maggie slept under his blanket, it was the joy of the hunter, not the fear of the hunted, which filled Isaac's soul.

His canoe was laden deep the evening of the journey to the Upper Snake River, but his paddle was strong. From time to time, in a race of quick water, he sounded a note of caution. Maggie heard in silence. She did not ask, as Mary would have done, "how far it was," or "was he afraid of bears." The dogs, at moments uneasy, gave her no concern. He had run the rapids with other passengers without thought of his strength or skill. To-night there was pride in the sweep of his paddle, in the service of this captive whose dark figure stood out against the stars when the woods grew thin.

Dawn broke as the landing was reached. Maggie did not "stand round" while he unloaded. She made no remark on the beauty of the scenery, nor inquired the way. She took her pack of feminine trappings, which Isaac lifted with awe to her shoulder, and followed the dogs up the path in silence. And Isaac was content. A pack was the symbol of reasonable service. Maggie was coming home.

Scrawled in red chalk on the rude door of the cabin was the notice:

Help yourself to matches.

Wanderers in the Upper Snake country read prohibitions into this generous invitation and forbore to trespass further on Isaac's liberality—save in dire straits, when borrowed supplies were paid for in cash or skins conspicuously deposited in the exact spot from which the supplies had been abstracted.

With Isaac's retirement gossip in Caranac languished. That he had given up his position as chief guide to the party on Faraway Lake, that, always scrupulously honest, he had engaged old Sabattis and his wife to fill the vacancies created by his matrimonial venture, that he and the avenging angel of slighted womanhood had vanished in the dusk of the river after their brief interview with the justice of the peace, was gradually forgotten, and over the honeymoon on the Upper Snake silence brooded like the fog in its valley.

II

Of all the cabins in the Caranac woods Isaac's was the only one which possessed a book-shelf. Former patrons had bequeathed to him the literary treasures taken into the woods as solace, with the result that in cover and content his library reflected as many tastes as there were colors in the legendary coat of Joseph.

Isaac was a man of method. Not till every claim of gun and rod, of moccasin and saucepan had been conscientiously discharged did the book-shelf come into its own with the hour of the fresh log on the fire, the refilled pipe and the spectacles skilfully supported by a leather shoe-string. The quiver of a leaf at a hundred yards could not escape Isaac's small slit of an eye. The printed page was another matter. In the wood trail his step was confident and sure. Not so in the wilderness of words. To see him standing before his book-shelf, spectacles on nose and thumb on title, was to see a man in the agony of choice. There were dog-eared paper volumes teeming with lords and ladies, knights and villains. He loved them as the child loves Punch and Judy—loved them, but did not believe in them. They were his theatre, stage puppets strutting through a brief existence. At the time he took them seriously, paid his entrance-fee of a tallow dip, and surrendered himself to the world of fantasy—but cautiously, with many mental reservations. Deeply as he sympathized with the beleaguered heroine, her passivity under persecution vexed his soul. If the "foolish crittur" had but opened her window and shouted for the sheriff, all her woes would have been over; and when Jessica's life was threatened, he warned her audibly of her peril in ejaculations whispered or explosive, as circumstances demanded.

There were also adventures in Darkest Africa, and while the nearest relative in Caranac woods to the denizens of the jungle was a small black bear, contemptuously designated by Isaac as a "varmint," the gilded picture of a mane or tusk on the cover was a magnet to his outstretched hand.

Interspersed among these tales of adventure were also stories of homely characters of the common sort. They were not common to Isaac's experience. His earliest recollections did not reach back to a mother. But something within him responded to these gentler apparitions, and their presence in even purely literary forms had given to the lonely cabin on the Upper Snake River the illusive atmosphere of home.

But of all the magnets on the shelf above the smoke-stained fireplace the most potent were certain ponderous volumes left by a patron of meditative tendencies who had proved as much of an enigma as the legacy left on departure. The Caranac woods were Isaac's Wall Street—a place to make one's living. To resort to them without gun or line, to be deaf to their day and night call, to weight a pack with books and not a single cartridge, was to earn the epithet of "the curiousest cuss I ever see." Isaac had pondered over this human phenomenon long and deep. Its incomprehensibility awed him. So did the incomprehensible books the Enigma left behind him. There was a "Genealogy of Morals," an "Essay on Woman," and, most alluring of all, "The Ego and His Own." Many a page had Isaac thumbed without comprehending a line.

To understand the spell of the book-shelf it must be remembered that such bare, naked events as birth, marriage, death, common in Caranac as elsewhere, were more common than books. Unadorned common things did not interest Isaac. He did the common things necessary to be done, as oiling his rifle or skinning a rabbit; the others, not directly in his path, did not concern him. If romance existed in Caranac, as undoubtedly it did, it was as an invisible undertow, obscured by the surface agitation of a monotonous life chiefly devoted to keeping the body warm and fed, and escaping the onset of black flies and midges. But books disclosed horizons hidden by Caranac woods, and emotions unknown to its hand-to-mouth inhabitants. Were they realities or phantoms? What the devil was the Ego anyway!

III

With Maggie's advent Reality crowded fiction from the place of honor and the lure of the book-shelf dwindled. Heretofore the loneliest spot on the Snake River was the interior of Isaac's cabin. Pleasure, Joy, Companionship dwelt in the wild. And now these dwelt with Maggie and the wild was a dreary waste.

That Maggie fell in with the ways of her new world must be set down to her credit. She was not afraid of a gun, as Mary was. She could sit straight in a canoe and did not despise moccasins. Little by little her first short excursions on sunny days lengthened, till her smaller footprints became as familiar to the wary followers of the trail as those of her master. All through the autumn she sang on the Upper Snake as at Faraway, though she had no need to, from force of habit, and Isaac drank deeper at the wells of contentment. For the labor of life had been divided by two, its joy doubled, and this division of toil and multiplication of comfort was fast becoming an economic necessity. He had been a lonely man. He still loved silence and solitude. But in respect to Maggie he was growing gregarious. On that fateful night when she deserted Faraway Lake she was glad of the darkness. The triumph in her shining eyes was for Mary, not for the silent figure bending to the sweep of the paddle, revelling in the illusions of man's aggressiveness.

Then the winter settled down with a grasp of iron, Isaac made pilgrimages to still lonelier places to set his traps in the wood lanes and waterways of the four-footed world, and the north wind tugged at Maggie's heart-strings and her pæan of victory disappeared with that of feathered creation. It was about this time that she turned to the neglected book-shelf and heard above the call of the wild the call of the world. With the breaking up of the ice the hold of winter loosened, the snow ran out of the creek, and down in Caranac the cows were turned out in search of scanty pasturage. Despite temporary relapses into freezing weather, the sap climbed higher, the willows grew more pliant, the buds swelled in their sheaths, the black flies arrived, smudges in the camps on Faraway sent up their blurs of smoke, and when the birds came Maggie sang again the irrepressible song of the Will to Live.

In his own reticent way Isaac also was dreaming. He had a secret, a momentous project, formed with his habitual prudence and deliberation. The season had been a prosperous one, as the pile of skins in the corner attested; and under the oak block serving as anvil were bank-notes of unusual denominations. All this accumulation of wealth, the fruit of toiling years, once destined to a future of rheumatism and failing eyesight, was to be laid at Maggie's feet. Memories of the book-shelf came to him as he trudged through the swamp—visions of strange lands, of palms and snow-clad peaks and cities. That he would be unhappy in cities he foresaw; palms were of doubtful reality, as bearing no resemblance to a real tree, and barren snow peaks were of no use to man or beast. But Maggie should see them, walk under the palms like the ladies in the picture, clothed in raiment of her own selection. Generous in his project, he was a miser with his secret. Not till leaves were falling, when Maggie's courage should falter, would he reveal it. Meanwhile, as day by day tired Nature yielded to the numbing touch of the north wind, the ferment of anticipation worked in Isaac's veins and the wine of the Indian summer mounted to Maggie's brain.

IV

Dusk was falling when after a long and last absence Isaac's canoe rounded the bend above the cabin. He had been away a week. Every trap had been collected, every pelt converted into cash. He was winding up his affairs. With every twist of his paddle's blade the beat of his sturdy heart quickened. Secrets of mighty import were to see the firelight before another sun rose.

Then his heart stood still.

From far away came the voice of Spot, always left behind to keep Maggie company. Every accent of inarticulate speech Isaac knew. Spot was on no trail of fox, had treed no coon. His cry was the cry of the lost, the forsaken. In the long centuries of man's companionship Spot had lost touch with his kin. Instinct was in the service of the master on whom, in spite of his canine teeth and carnivorous lineage, he depended for food as well as sympathy. Crouched at Isaac's feet, the ears of his fellow stiffened, his back bristling. Isaac listened.

Something had happened to Maggie!

Swift as an arrow the canoe leaped forward with the current. Overhead a flicker screamed. A muskrat plunged in the rushes. The wings of the fleeing duck beat on the water.

As the keel grounded on the strip of sand beside the rude landing-stage improvised for Maggie's convenience, Isaac stood up, his eye fixed on the spot where the other canoe should be.

It was not there.

A former patron, bred to worldly wisdom, had once remarked in Isaac's hearing that he believed nothing he heard and half of what he saw. Dependent on sight and hearing, Isaac believed implicitly in both. Maggie's canoe was gone. Maggie had gone up-stream to meet him. Maggie had gone to Caranac. Nothing had happened to Maggie.

He stepped ashore, hauling the canoe to safety. "Be still," he said to Spot, whining deliriously at his feet.

Slowly bewilderment was succeeding to belief; reason, stubborn, returning. It was impossible to have missed Maggie on the narrow reach of the river. Maggie had never gone to Caranac alone.

Without unloading he went up the path, the dogs barking joyously. At the top of the rise he stood still. The window was dark, the chimney cold. At the shut door the dogs sniffed suspiciously. Isaac laughed—a short, defiant laugh flung in the face of fear, knowing neither why he laughed nor why he feared—pushed open the door and struck a match.

No red-checked cloth covered a table spread for supper. On the hearth were Maggie's moccasins, side by side, symbols of a service finished. The shelf where her shoes had stood was bare. So were the pegs where once-discarded finery hung. From the nail on the wall the clock stared at him, silent. Maggie wound it Saturdays. To-day was Wednesday. Maggie had been gone four days. Isaac saw these objects, registering themselves mechanically on his brain, in a kind of stupor. Then suddenly, with the last flicker of the match, a dumb rage seized him—the rage of primitive man bent on killing.

Nothing had happened to Maggie.

With the touch of Spot's rough tongue on his hand this reversion to primitive incarnations vanished. He groped to the cupboard, found the stump of candle, cut the string from which hung the bone of venison, built the fire and sat down in the chair where so often, wet and tired, he had warmed his cramped hands before Maggie took the kettle from the hook. Growling at every approach of his mate. Spot crunched his bone greedily.

Minute followed minute. Past and present mingled confusedly in Isaac's brain. Opposite stood Maggie's chair—on the hearth her moccasins—ghosts of a former existence. From time to time he moved uneasily, haunted by a thought of which he was ashamed. At last, unresisting, he went to the oak block and uncovered the flat stone beneath. Maggie had played fair. Only the little moleskin bag in which she kept her own savings was missing. That was right and proper.

He sat down again before the fire, as once he sat when Maggie slept in his lean-to at Faraway. Spot looked up inquiringly at the silent, immobile face. Wind and rain and sun had left neither sob nor tear in the wizened body. Satisfied, Spot stretched himself at a prudent distance from the blaze and closed his eyes.

One evening in late November, when summer had made its last protest against the inevitable, a voice from the circle gathered about the stove in Caranac's grocery remarked Isaac was late in getting in his stock of winter provisions.

A tall, lank stranger from the lumber camp over the divide spoke.

"You won't see Isaac this season. He's gone up north country."

"Warn't there no woman with him?" queried another.

The stranger laughed.

"I didn't see none—nuthin' but two dogs."

After a silence, refilling his pipe, the stranger spoke again.

"Say, he must have been a queer cuss. I stopped at his ranch up the Snake comin' down. What d'ye think was writ on the door?

Help yourself!

I looked in a bit. There warn't nuthin' there to speak of—only an old pair of moccasins."